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too, are not just one race but many. Here, the balance was quite otherwise.
A sudden commotion went up and then all the slaves were racing down toward a large opening cut in the
cave. Tulema looked at me, shouted, Feeding time! and was off.
Perforce, I ran after her.
High in the rocky ceiling wide crystal facets showed the gleam of fire. I knew that crystal. It comes from
Loh exactly where is a closely guarded secret and on it a fire may be kindled and it will not crack
or distort. It is much used for holding heat and light above ceilings . . . I was to find that this crystal did
not come from Loh, and thereby was cheap enough to light slave quarters but I run ahead of my
story.
That crystal is known as fireglass.
So it was that plenty of light in the cave allowed me to keep the supple form of Tulema in sight. Through
the opening the cave passage debouched into a series of openings, each one walled off from its neighbor.
Each cell was strongly barred off from the clearing, also. The slaves ran past these cells and on into
another spacious cave where food had been left spread out over the floor.
The scene that followed, given the circumstances, should not have sickened me. The slaves fell on the
food with cries and fought and struggled over the choicest portions. Coarse stuff, it was, plentiful,
belly-filling. A kind of maize grows on Kregen, dilse, that can be mixed with milk and water and
pounded, salted, and served up in a variety of ways. It is cheap where it grows freely, for it needs little
cultivation. Great tureens of dilse stood about, the carrying poles all carefully removed from the handles
of the tureens. It steamed. Also there was a little Kregan bread those long fluffy rolls, although this
stuff was stale and hard sacks of onions, a few rounds of cheese, and what was clearly a single vosk
cut into portions and cooked. By the time Tulema and I reached the feeding cave all the vosk was
claimed, the bread was vanishing, the onions were rolling about with frantic figures in pursuit of them, but
there was plenty of dilse for those unable to secure the better food, those too weak and feeble to fight for
it.
Now I understood why Tulema s face showed a thinness her body did not reveal. That is the blight of
dilse.
A large and somewhat ferocious Rapa was striding past me. He held a thick rasher of vosk, a piece of
bread, and no less than four onions. He knocked an Och away, who attempted with one of his four arms
to steal the vosk rasher. The Och tumbled against the wall, screeching. Tulema shrank back.
I said to the Rapa: I would be obliged if you would share that vosk rasher, and a piece of bread, and
half the onions with this girl, here.
The Rapas are notorious in their treatment of women. Once my Delia had been threatened with the
horrible fate of being tossed naked into the Rapa court. The Rapa leered.
You may go to the Ice Floes of Sicce, he said, and went to push past.
Well maybe I was some kind of Prince Majister but here and now I was slave in a slave pen. I
knew slave manners. I hit the Rapa in the guts and took the vosk, the bread, and two of the onions. The
other two rolled over the floor and were instantly pounced on by an old Fristle woman.
The Rapa tried to straighten up, hissing, his beaked face vicious, his crest swelling. But I hit him again,
with my free hand, and turned to Tulema.
Eat.
But you
I am not hungry.
That was true. Only moments ago I had risen from the campfire, replete with the finest delicacies Valka
could offer.
She fell on the food ravenously.
If you were not strong and determined and ruthless here you would not die of starvation, for you could
eat dilse, but you would slowly decline. Maybe, I thought even then, there was purpose in this. I had
some inkling of slave-masters ways.
We walked away and I waited for Tulema to finish eating.
Then I said: Tulema. Listen closely. I want to know the names and conditions of all the people who
were with us in the cell when I hesitated. I could hardly say to her, When I arrived, for that would
demand explanations I would not give, and if given, would not be believed. I finished: When the
slave-master was knocked down.
The food inside her warmed her. She did not giggle slaves only laugh and sing when something
special happens, like the master falling down and breaking his neck but she let me know she thought
my remark highly apposite.
I think I can remember. But why?
Instinctively I had to quell my instant rush of bad language, my browbeating intolerance of any who
would question an order. I said: Does anyone escape from here, Tulema?
We believe so we hope so but I am frightened to go
That did make some kind of sense, but it was a tortuous thread. Tulema told me something of herself,
and thereby something also of where we were. She came from a seaside town called Fellow, and she
sounded sad when she told me of her home in Herrelldrin. She had every right to be sad. We were on
the island of Faol, and she shivered as she told me. The island lay off the coast of Havilfar.
Havilfar!
So far on Kregen I had trod the land of the continents of Segesthes and of Turismond. I had touched at
Erthyrdrin, in the continent of Loh. But the continent of Havilfar was all new and unexplored by me, virgin
territory. I fancied I was in for some wild adventures and some seething action in the future, and, as you
shall hear, I was not wrong.
After the meal a sudden shrilling of a stentor s horn made everyone jump and then rush madly for the
exits. I stumbled along after Tulema, trying to keep her in sight in the frenzied rushing to and fro of slaves.
Screams and cries rang out, people shouted for friends, and I saw the way the slaves kept darting
frightened glances back, into the dimmer recesses of the caves.
We all pushed up against the lenk-wood bars.
I blinked against the glare of the twin suns and looked out. I knew we were in the southern hemisphere
of Kregen now, and therefore the suns would cross the sky to the northward, but just where we were off
Havilfar in relation to the equator I could not say. I guessed we were nearer that imaginary line than I had
been in Vallia, nearer, even, than I had been in Pandahem. For the northern sweep of Havilfar rises out of
the southern ocean east of southern Loh, below the rain forests of Chem. I fancied Inch s Ng groga
would not be too far away, down to the southwest.
In the clearing cut from the jungle I saw guards strutting, banging their whips against gaitered legs,
swaggering in their tunics of forest green. Among them a number of well-dressed men and women moved
as though on a shopping expedition.
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